Oct. 24, 2004 - 19:11 MDT

THE WONDERING JEW

Wonder ?

I wish them well, in fact, I wish them the best of the best. An article in this morning's The Denver Post gives an idea of how things are going in our world. The article is by Celia W. Dugger of The New York Times, in part:

Africa's poorest kids crowd schools as fees are abolished

Classrooms across the continent are bulging with millions of disadvantaged children who were once denied a free education

"MALINDI, KENYA -- "More than 200 first graders, many of them barefoot, clothed in rags and dizzy with hunger stream into Rebecca Mwanyonyo's each day. Squeezed together on the cement floor, they sit hip to hip, wildly waving their hands to get her to call on them."

"Overnight, more than a million additional children showed up for school last year when Kenya's newly elected government abolished fees that had been prohibitively high for many parents, about $16 a year."

"Kenya is not alone. Responding to popular demand for education, it is one of a raft of African nations contending with both a wondrous opportunity and nettlesome challenge: teaching the millions of children who have poured into schools as country after country -- from Malawi and Lesotho to Uganda and Tanzania -- has suddenly made primary education free."

"The explosion in enrollments has put enormous pressure on overburdened often ill-managed education systems. What hangs in the balance is the future of a generation of African children desperately reaching out for learning as a lifeline from poverty, even as poverty itself presents a fearsome obstacle."

"In large measure, the idea of free education has gained powerful momentum because politicians in democratizing African nations have found it a great vote-getter. deepening poverty had meant even small annual school fees -- less than an American family would spend on a single fast-food meal -- had put education beyond reach for millions."

"In sub-Sahran Africa, almost all countries are under pressure to abolish school fees for primary education," said Cream Wright, education chief for the United Nations Children's Fund. "It will spread, especially if we show it works.

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A funny world this. In Africa, a continent predominantly populated by near starving people clamoring for what is considered by us to be our right. The politicians using public education for all as promises to the poverty stricken populace in order to get votes. It would be interesting to know if those politicians have in mind a rational solution of just how all that education can be accomplished. Do any politicians in our present day world have in their reach solutions to problems of long standing complexity ?

And we, are we all that much better ? We have free public education that was decided by our forebears to be absolutely a necessity. Free public education that has been degenerating by the year it appears. Now we have "charter" schools, "vouchers" things wherein our tax dollars being spent to correct something that should have been fixed before or never allowed to happen in the first place.

Are we as a nation regressing as rapidly as the African nations are trying to progress ? I Wonder ? . . . . . . . . . . . .

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